Progressive Mistrust of The People

President Barack Obama’s budget willinclude $10.7 billion to build a nationwide wireless network foremergency workers and $5 billion to help Americans get mobileaccess to high-speed Internet service. (Bloomberg)

Like all progressive schemes, it sounds good, but there's a rat in there somewhere...

“High-speed Internet allows small businesses to reachmarkets beyond the one that they’re in, in the next town, in thenext state or even in a different country,” FederalCommunications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski said in aFeb. 8 interview. “We need to take that as seriously as we tookelectricity and telephone service in the 20th century.”

They declare the internet a public utility and they now own and control it. Their other angle is to put the internet on “the public airwaves” via WiMax, and the FCC now has a clear case for jurisdiction and control.

Also, businesses have discovered and leveraged the power of the internet all on their own.  They don't need Obama's Kommisars "helping" them.

This displays the fundamental fallacy of progressivism:  If government doesn't do it, it won't get done.

John Stossell quickly punctures this BS balloon, by explaining spontaneous order...

“Another way to understand spontaneous order is to think about the simple pencil. Leonard Read, who established the Foundation for Economic Education, wrote an essay titled, "I, Pencil," which began, "(N)o single person on the face of this earth knows how to make (a pencil)."

That sounds absurd -- but think about it. No one person can make a pencil. Vast numbers of people participate in making the materials that become a pencil: the wood, the brass, the graphite, the rubber for the eraser, the paint and so on. 

Then go back another step, to the people who make the saws and machinery that are used to make the materials that go into a pencil. And before that, people mine iron to make the steel that makes the machines that make the materials that go into a pencil. It's all without central direction, without these people even knowing they are all working ultimately to make pencils. 

Thousands of people mining, melting, cutting, assembling, packing, selling, shipping -- and yet you can buy pencils for a few pennies each.”  (Stossel – Spontaneous Order)

This is how the world works, and no single entity acts as a controller.  It is spontaneous order brought about by millions of self-interested people.  Not only does it work, it has worked to bring the price down on every consumer good imaginable.  Our homes are filled with luxuries our parents and grandparents only dreamed of.

I recommend you go read Leonard Read's little essay.  It only takes five minutes.  Better yet, have your kids read it as well.  I'll leave you with an excerpt:

Mail delivery is exceedingly simple when compared, for instance, to the making of an automobile or a calculating machine or a grain combine or a milling machine or to tens of thousands of other things. 

Delivery? Why, in this area where men have been left free to try, they deliver the human voice around the world in less than one second; they deliver an event visually and in motion to any person’s home when it is happening; they deliver 150 passengers from Seattle to Baltimore in less than four hours; they deliver gas from Texas to one’s range or furnace in New York at unbelievably low rates and without subsidy; they deliver each four pounds of oil from the Persian Gulf to our Eastern Seaboard—halfway around the world—for less money than the government charges for delivering a one-ounce letter across the street!  (I, Pencil – Leonard Read)

Bonus question.  Why does domestically-produced milk cost more per gallon that gasoline that is pumped out of the ground as crude overseas, shipped around the world, refined and shipped again to gas stations all across the nation?

Net Neutered

I posted my latest criticism of the FCC Net Neutrality ruling at Free Republic and got slammed by an FCC apologist know-it-all.

I plead guilty only to the charge of not making my main point clear: Free markets allocate resources way more efficiently than a government central-planning committee can.

Progressives love attaching warm and fuzzy feel good names like "Net Neutrality" on their statist projects in order to mask their true intent: Taming the digital wild west known as the internet.

Here's the Net Neutrality Problem in a Nutshell

The story goes that Level 3 Communications, which handles Netflix’s Internet traffic, says that, all of a sudden, Comcast started demanding more money to accept said traffic.

The problem is that there really doesn’t seem to be an easy way out of this mess. Clearly streaming media is taking over the world, but there’s one problem: bandwidth isn’t free, and that’s Comcast’s biggest complaint. If you want Comcast to carry this or that stream, then you can’t expect Comcast to do so at a loss, right?

Granted, I’ve no idea how much it costs Comcast to run and maintain a broadband network, but I recognize that they’re in business to make money. (Nicholas Deleon – Crunchgear)

The point here is that the content providers, the infrastructure people and the ISPs will work it out; they always have.  Nobody wants to make customers mad, since mad customers take their money elsewhere.  That concept is foreign to a monopolistic government bureaucrat.

With the Net Neutrality decision, the Federal Government has picked winners and losers.  Here are a few headlines following internet FCC's power grab:

StockMarketsReview.com: FCC Decision Disappoints Comcast

MarketWatch: Netflix Jumps

So government poobahs who have no idea what they're monkeying with end up swinging markets and stifling technology.

A WSJ article asks, "Is This the Peak for Netflix?"  The peak, if it has happened, has nothing to do with the FCC decision and everything to do with competition from the likes of Apple TV, Amazon, Roku, Boxee and Google TV.

Technology and the markets move fast, government needs to get the hell out of the way and stop blocking innovation and competition.

More reading:
Net Neutrality and the TV Wars
CATO - The FCC Should Not Regulate the Internet

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/01/canada-gets-first-bitter-dose-of-metered-internet-billing.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss

FCC: Fascists Controlling Communication

Inside Every Progressive is a Tyrant Struggling to be Free... And Oppress Others

When liberals like Al Crapton (he calls Limbaugh "Lumbar," so I call Sharpton, "Crapton") shout about conservatives having no right to talk on public airwaves, it means liberal talk radio is getting its ass kicked by conservatives.

When irrelevant nobodies like the Reverend or any MSNBC ranter talks like this, no one even takes notice anymore. Their audience can fit in a port-o-potty.

But when a government official proposes such dangerous and un-American absurdities, it's time to sit up and take notice.

FCC Commissioner Michael Copps is proposing all radio and TV stations that broadcast over public airwaves submit to a "public values test."

Copps had suggested that the test would make a broadcaster's license renewal contingent upon proof that they meet a prospective set of federal criteria. (Hillicon Valley – FCC Push)

Local boards packed with angry, agenda-driven liberals would sit in judgment on radio and tv stations, using government-approved criteria such as "Diversity Compliance."  Gotta have the government recommended daily amount of one legged lesbian church bishops, gay soldiers, peace-loving Muslims and of course the stupidest species in America:  The White Male Father and Husband!

Progressives cannot win in the free marketplace of ideas so they propose to use the coercive power of the state to shut it all down.

Media outlets would be required to submit to the Ministry of Truth disclosure reports and programming plans proving their worthiness and "meaningful commitment to public affairs and news programming."  Progressive toadies and bullhorn-wielding activists at the local level will be the foot soldiers in this Obama-approved Hush Rush campaign.  

And make no mistake, Copps and his fellow statists want to expand their purview to all communications outlets, including cable and internet.  Here is Der Kommissar in his own words:

"What we've had in recent years is an aberration where we have had no oversight of the media.

It's a pretty serious situation that we're in. I think American media has a bad case of substance abuse right now. We are not producing the body of news and information that democracy needs to conduct its civic dialogue [...] we have to reverse that trend." (Copps quoted at NewsBusters)

Is this guy crazy? We've got news coming out our ears. Yes, much of it is sports and celebrity-driven frivolity, but serious news and analysis is as close as your computer keyboard or local library periodicals section.

All Palin, All the Time
Maybe he has in mind a press that flocked to Alaska for synchronized Sara Palin dumpster dives?  This same press corps spent more time investigating an Ohio plumber than they did the Democratic nominee for president. Is this the news media dereliction the FCC Kommissar seeks to stamp out?  I doubt it.

The IBD editors ask the most important question:

Who is Copps to make such demands? And why does a man who thinks like a tyrant hold such a high-ranking position in the U.S. government?

It's reasonable to ask, as Republican Rep. Joe Barton of Texas did in a letter to Copps this week, if the commissioner means to give the federal governmentthe power to determine what content is available for Americans to consume. (IBD)

Indeed.  The federal government and its batwinged gargoyles like Copps are not neutral.  They are biased and are therefore unfit to be the arbiters of what free men and women can or cannot read, see and hear.  We're smart enough to figure it out on our own without a paternalistic statist holding our hand.  MSNBC's ratings are in the toilet; America knows crap when they see it.

Cut Government - Start by Dumping the FCC

The FCC is an outmoded appendage of the past.  Time to shut it down.  As a bonus, we would save $325 million per year in the process

The same organization that forced all consumers to buy Ma Bell-made telephones for decades, the same FCC that enforced speech codes via radio "fairness doctrines," the same FCC that took two decades after its invention to OK cellular technology for the marketplace and acted similarly sluggishly with cable and satellite innovation has no business online.  (Harsanyi)

Jack Shafer sees the FCC's latest "Net Neutrality" power grab as a "solution" looking for a problem:

The FCC's sense of urgency may befuddle you. After all, the many-colored, hydra-headed, and infernally useful beast that is the U.S. Internet came into being without government demands and decrees. Without commandments from the FCC or anybody else, American broadband companies invested tens of billions of dollars to create an Internet infrastructure for their customers.

He also explains how the free market works:

Would any of the companies currently in the broadband game have built their systems without the expectation that they could "leverage" their investment? I doubt it.

Do they lust for an Internet environment that imprisons us in their "walled garden" and bleeds us for every penny during our stay? Of course they do.

But then why—in the absence of FCC regulatory powers to ban such Internet land-grabs—haven't the broadband providers erected such walled gardens?

Because 1) they face competition from another broadband provider and don't want to give their customers an incentive to leave, or 2) where they're the only broadband provider, they tend not to want to give a potential competitor encouragement to enter their market.

That's it in a nutshell.  This isn't about the Orwellian sounding "Net Neutrality" or "Open Internet."  As David Harsanyi warns us...

"... doublespeak is still flourishing [...] it reminds us that the FCC's institutional positions conflict with the vibrancy and freedom of the Internet." (Harsanyi)

It's about power and control.  The progressive urge to regulate every last corner of our lives is metastisizing and has spread to the internet

Even the staunchest net neutrality advocate will concede that net neutrality is a fuzzy concept. No network can be purely neutral. If the current Internet didn't prioritize some traffic at the expense of other traffic, the whole enterprise would grind to a halt like Manhattan's streets when the stoplights stop working.

So the basic question here is who will set the Internet's priorities, the government or the providers. (Shafer)

Jack Shafer - Who's Internet is it Anyway?

Harsanyi - Save the Net; Abolish the FCC